The robotics industry is growing rapidly, and to a large extent the development of this market sector is due to the area of social robotics ? the production of robots that are designed to enter the space of human social interaction, both physically and semantically. Since social robots present a new type of social agent, they have been aptly classified... more...

Compliant mechanisms are able to transfer movements and forces. These systems can be fabricated monolithically and are miniaturizable, friction?free, require little maintenance and can also be used to create complex pathways. This book is devoted to models for compliant mechanisms or parts of mechanisms, demonstrating their application in gripper technology,... more...

Learning from Demonstration (LfD) explores techniques for learning a task policy from examples provided by a human teacher. The field of LfD has grown into an extensive body of literature over the past 30 years, with a wide variety of approaches for encoding human demonstrations and modeling skills and tasks. Additionally, we have recently seen a focus... more...

We are facing a new technological challenge on how to store and retrieve knowledge and manipulate intelligence for autonomous services by intelligent systems which should be capable of carrying out real world tasks autonomously. To address this issue, robot researchers have been developing intelligence technology (InT) for ?robots that think? which... more...

This book provides an introduction to the emerging field of planning and decision making for aerial robots. An aerial robot is the ultimate form of Unmanned Aerial Vehicle, an aircraft endowed with built-in intelligence, requiring no direct human control and able to perform a specific task. It must be able to fly within a partially structured environment,... more...

Modern Gear Production focuses on the processes and methods in gear making. The book first gives information on the history of gear making and types of gears. Topics such as the classification of gears based on the disposition of their shafts; shafts lying in the same plane with axes intersecting; and shafts lying in parallel planes but with axes... more...

This book discusses the application of probabilistics to the investigation of mechanical systems. The book shows, for example, how random function theory can be applied directly to the investigation of random processes in the deflection of cam profiles, pitch or gear teeth, pressure in pipes, etc. The author also deals with some other technical applications... more...

The human hand and its dexterity in grasping and manipulating objects are some of the hallmarks of the human species. For years, anatomic and biomechanical studies have deepened the understanding of the human hand‚??s functioning and, in parallel, the robotics community has been working on the design of robotic hands capable of manipulating objects... more...

Planar linkages play a very important role in mechanical engineering. As the simplest closed chain mechanisms, planar four-bar linkages are widely used in mechanical engineering, civil engineering and aerospace engineering.Design of Special Planar Linkages proposes a uniform design theory for planar four-bar linkages. The merit of the method proposed... more...

In recent years, robots have been built based on cognitive architecture which has been developed to model human cognitive ability. The cognitive architecture can be a basis for intelligence technology to generate robot intelligence. In this edited book the robot intelligence is classified into six categories: cognitive intelligence, social intelligence,... more...